Under the Tenement Rooftops: Immigrant and Migrant Families in New York

Ninety-seven Orchard Street opened in 1863 and housed a succession of European immigrants until the double blow of the Great Depression and the impact of the 1924 Johnson Reed Act forced the landlord to evict the tenants. Down the block, 103 Orchard, built in 1888, kept its doors open throughout the twentieth century, hosting Jewish and Italian immigrants in its early years, and Holocaust refugees, Puerto Rican migrants and Chinese immigrants in its later years. This mini course traces how immigration law impacted the residents of these buildings, and how they carved out new lives once they arrived. Census records, newspaper articles and oral histories will be used to bring the families’ situations to life and situate them in their contexts. A visit to these buildings—now home to the Tenement Museum—will focus on how primary sources from the  Center for Jewish History shed light on an 1870s German Jewish family and a 1950s Polish Jewish refugee family.

Annie Polland has been Senior Vice President of Education & Programs at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City since 2009. She is responsible for developing the museum’s tour content and other interpretive and educational programs. Polland’s scholarly work, Landmark of the Spirit: The Eldridge Street Synagogue (Yale University Press, 2009), Working for the Sabbath (Labor: Studies in Working Class History in America, Spring 2009), May a Free Thinker Help a Pious Man?: The Shared World of the Secular and the Religious (American Jewish History, December 2007) investigates the religious life of Eastern European Jews in New York. She is a visiting professor at Eugene Lang College, the New School. She formerly served as Vice President for Education at the Museum at Eldridge Street.

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